


And Still the Stars

by Bubblekilt



Series: Sing for the Years (Shiro Week 2017) [1]
Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Shiro Week 2017
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-19
Updated: 2017-11-19
Packaged: 2019-02-04 11:11:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,279
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12769800
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bubblekilt/pseuds/Bubblekilt
Summary: Shiro has a bad night.  Black helps, in her way.  Written for Shiro Week 2017, Day 1: Space.





	And Still the Stars

**Author's Note:**

> Happy Shiro Week, everyone!

  There were some nights he just couldn’t shake it.

  On other nights, at least the flashbacks gave him something to hang on to.  He could remember the claws raking at his sides, the purple lights, the feeling of cold metal at his back—but when he woke up wrapped in sticky sheets he could hold his head in his hands and gasp because he wasn’t there.  He wasn’t.  However long it took to convince himself, he could wander the halls or train until the Galra seemed almost like what it was supposed to be—a distant memory, something to be pushed past.

  He would train until he got too tired to focus, go down and haul Pidge to bed, wander the maze of the castle halls until the day cycle lights came on and signaled breakfast.  He’d go to the bridge and stare out at the stars, looking up the constellations in the Altean database and tripping over the pronunciations.  When he was lucky an alarm would go off, give him an excuse to jump into action or trouble or _something_ besides his own head.

  Those nights were doable.  Not easy, but something else to survive.

  Then there were nights like these—the nights when Shiro woke up wrung out and sweat soaked, and he couldn’t remember why.  Usually it was after being in the pod, or coming back from a particularly bad mission.  The walls were too close, the pressure of deep space banging along the hull and vibrating when he pressed his back into the corner.  Some kind of noise escaped him, and he couldn’t tell whether it was a groan or a whimper.  It brought him back a little bit, just enough to wince at the way it echoed in the dark.

  What a pathetic sound. (Were the walls thin enough for the others to hear?) His knees were crumpled under him, and he forced them straight as he pushed himself out of bed.  Without the wall at his back, the creeping feeling behind him just got worse.  It was like someone was standing just beyond what he could see--breathing close enough to ripple the hairs at the back of his neck, the point of a claw running down his spine like it could just push in and _pierce_ —

  Shiro bolted from the room, snagging the blanket from his bed as he went. 

  The lights were a soft blue in the hallway, the hum of the castle ship a quiet reminder of where he was.  Everything was still too loud, but Shiro felt better with the door at his back.  The hallway that housed the paladin’s quarters was empty, everyone long since having gone to bed for the night.  It was for that reason and that reason only that Shiro felt comfortable sliding along down the hallway with the wall at his back.  

  This was ridiculous.  He was being ridiculous. 

  But the second his shoulder blades felt the chill of the air behind him, his stomach would jump and he would slam his top half back to the safety of something solid. 

  _Damn it._ Gritting his teeth, he shoved himself into the middle of the hallway and tried to ignore the way his knees were shaking.  He was an adult. He was a pilot.  He was a paladin of Voltron.  He was—

_Champion._

  Her voice came unbidden, scratching at his ears like a chalkboard screech, and when his eyes cleared again Shiro found himself on the floor.  He couldn’t get in a breath the right way, but his lungs were heaving and he could hear this war-drum thud in his ears.  Down on his knees like this, he could see the stars reflected on the floor in front of him, shining down from the porthole above. 

  Even those cold little glimmers seemed to be taunting him— _this is what you wanted._

  Space hadn’t seemed so cold in a very long time.  Not since the time he had pressed himself against the window of a Galra ship with alarms sounding behind him, trying to snatch some flicker of where he was before they could drag him back.  The constellations weren’t the familiar wrap of the summer triangle or Orion’s belt hiding behind foggy winter breath—his fingers had dug into the glass when he realized that these stars wouldn’t speak.  They would only stare back at him like the stranger he was.  Space was too big to realize, but Shiro had never paid attention to that before Kerberos.  The vacuum they all warned him about in the Garrison training was more familiar to him than his own skin, but it hadn’t recognized him.  He was too small to be seen out here, a speck with a bad habit of getting itself into trouble. 

  The sky, he realized, would not come easy to him out here. Instead, it just stared back.  _No one is coming to save you.  Nothing is coming to sweep you away from yourself._

  Other times, he could distract himself from that feeling. He would catch warmth in the way Lance would samba around Hunk while he was cooking or the little smiles Keith would shoot at the team when he thought no one was looking.  He still had faith in the flickers of life around the castle, but once he was alone like this the stark reality of the stars would rush up to smack him in the face.    _You think you know the universe, little paladin?  Come, let me show you infinity._

 It was too big for him, and the weight of the stars on his shoulders was enough to send him spinning again.  He was going to slip.  He was going to fly off into nothing and those stars would suck him dry without blinking.  That vacuum couldn’t be fought.  He couldn’t throw himself at a nebula the same way he could tackle an opponent.  There wasn’t a way to slice through something so cold it could turn you inside out.

   A mental bump knocked him out of his thoughts, and he flinched, waiting for Haggar’s voice to circle back and drag him down.  Shiro shivered at the sudden warmth that flooded his chest.  _Black_ , he realized as the rumble in his head grew to a question mark.  She hadn’t really been able to fit herself to speech yet, but they made do with what common ground they could find.  She was big the way the stars were, but Black spoke in feelings, in the voices of his Paladins, in ideas like **no** and **small** and **mine.** The stars in her pulled at the ones around him until they weren’t so crushing, until he was able to push himself back on to his feet.  In his mind’s eye, Shiro saw himself walking towards the hangar, Black’s eyes lighting the way in front of him. She led him deeper through the winding halls, but the whole time the clatter of the castle's engine made his legs seize.  She wasn’t exactly patient as they wove their way through the dark, but she kept stopping to nudge him along when his knees locked.  Eventually she just kept a pace around his thoughts, guiding him through the dark with a light tug.  His brain still felt like it was floating along behind him like a balloon on a string—he knew his body should hurt, and maybe it did, but he was only thinly connected to his limbs.  One cut and maybe he would just drift away. 

  He followed his feet to the bridge, Black’s hangar stretching up, up and her headlamps glowing a bright, warm yellow as he clambered into her jaws.  Black rumbled as he sank into the pilot’s chair, the space around him coming to life with a soft light.  It was with dim amusement that he realized the blanket was still slung over his shoulders.  With a hum, the cockpit started to heat around him anyway.  She was trying to ease the shivers, he realized, wrapping herself easily around his mind.  

  “T-thank you.”  He managed, shifting uncomfortably under the full weight of her attention.  Black pressed herself against his back to fill the empty shiver-space there.  _Mine,_ he felt her communicate.  _No fear.  Mine._ Shiro came back slowly, his lungs settling into his chest again and the cockpit coming into sharper focus around him.  He wrapped a hand around one of the controls, feeling the mold of it in his fist as Black helped him to tether himself. 

 An image came of the other lions pressing up too, circling with their backs to him.  _Pride.  Protect._

  The idea of it made his eyes prickle painfully—what had he done to deserve that?  He hadn’t been there in the hallway, the lights on but nobody home, and now that he was remembering it he was horrified.  What if someone had seen?  What if Shiro had stumbled upon Pidge when he was only half-there, and had used the arm on instinct?  It wasn’t impossible—more than once during training he’d had to call a water break and rush to the hallway when he felt a flashback starting to overwhelm him, the sparking flare in his arm a dull throb as he tried to breathe through the need to ignite, to fight with his teeth bared.

  _No._ That one was one of Black’s favorite words, just after _fly_ and _pride._ There was a different kind of pride pressing in on him, the kind that made his cheeks burn under Allura’s gaze after bad nights and made him stumble through hallways alone instead of knocking on someone's door.

  Instead of letting him get sucked deeper into his head, the front viewscreen cleared and Shiro found himself staring at the hangar doors.  There wasn’t a word this time, just a gentle press.  She was asking his permission, asking him to trust her again. 

  “Always,” Shiro reminded her, giving his own gentle nudge in her direction.  He was happy she asked anyway. 

  The hangar doors came open, and Shiro felt the engines underneath him thrum to life.  This was so different from any of the ships he’d piloted—the thrusters a quiet push that went so much farther than they were supposed to.  She was magnificent, he realized every time he climbed back into this seat.  Every time, he was met with the same amused feeling bubbling in the quintessence pushing up against his, the mental equivalent of a fond eye-roll.

  Small.  He was small to her, too.  He felt it as Black steered herself up and out of the hangar, feeling the same joy ripple through the bond as they went weightless into the stars outside the castle.  It was harder to feel afraid when Black was so happy to be up in the sky—she looped the towers once, twice, and again as Shiro felt his stomach ride up with excitement.  She turned both their gazes to the farther reaches of the sky, where the horizon would be if they were planet-side.  Through the connection there was the flicker of a question, and Shiro saw his own feet on a running track, numbers ticking up faster than he could keep track.  Highway lines, the distance gauge on the castle bridge. 

  “How far?”  he asked, and felt her answer—yes.  “I guess we don’t know, back on Earth.  Farther than we can imagine.  Universes are bigger than we could comprehend, even after years of space travel.  Even bigger than you.”

  He was joking, but he felt her take up his words and send them back. 

_Not big._ He saw himself through her eyes, then, the day they had first met.  He was so tiny, staring up like a speck in paladin armor as she made the walls shiver with her roar.  Backed by the stars, though, she made herself as small as him.  The universe, it seemed, was bigger than her too.

  Black seemed to be struggling to come up with a word, then.  She showed him Hunk first, then seemed to think again.  He saw the double dorm back at the Garrison, the bright lines of quintessence connecting them all when they formed Voltron.  Black easing the cracks in herself onto him as she showed him the ruins of Daibazaal.

  “Share?”  he asked her.  _Share_.  The word was alien to her, but the concept felt rather homey.  Share and same and bond, all things that sounded like this: he was small, but she would protect him, even if the stars reduced them both to almost nothing.

  They were small out here—but they weren’t alone in it.  The realization was almost overwhelming, and Shiro felt some of the weight on his shoulders shift.  Without the pressure, he could feel exhaustion creeping up on him.  The cockpit was still warm, the stars beautiful again with Black at his back.  They were still unfamiliar, but he could see the Altean names taking form in Black’s mind, classifications and numbers in an easy whir of information.  He felt his eyes getting heavy as a purr rumbled in his head, and he shuffled so that he could wrap the blanket around himself, slumping down in the comfortable light coming from the viewscreens.

  _Rest, paladin._

_"_ So bossy," he murmured, already losing himself in the soft stars outside.  He felt her grumble across the bond and grinned hazily.  Black didn't have to know the words to call him cheeky--he could feel it, a kind of fond disapproval.  But it settled just as quickly as it had risen in his head, and he felt her push again, gently this time.

   _Rest._

That was the last thing Shiro remembered for a while.


End file.
